The Pain Of Growth: What You Leave Behind

It’s easy to see how changing and improving is hard. It requires challenging yourself, being uncomfortable and doing hard things.

It’s about doing things you haven’t previously done, stepping outside of your comfort zone and dealing with uncharted territory.

But growing isn’t just about the things you start doing, it’s also about everything that you leave behind.

Sometimes, it’s easy to forget how accustomed we can get to our circumstances, even when they're not exactly great, even when we want something better.

Leaving that state is hard, and it'll be a balancing act between doing what it takes to grow and letting go of who you currently are. 

Here are a few things to expect when becoming the new you.

Identity

The first one is your identity, which is arguably the biggest.

When “you” change, what you’re referring to is your identity. It’s who you see yourself as, identify with, the group you fit yourself into, and someone who you’ve become comfortable with.

Doing different things and improving yourself is more than just becoming wealthier or more educated, it’s a shift from one identity to the next.

It’s the reason smokers say “I’m trying to quit”, instead of “I don’t smoke”. This is your identity at play.

It’s clear to see the difficulty in becoming the person you want to be, but what about losing the person you’ve always been? 

Obviously, you’re still you, but you’re leaving parts of yourself behind. The brain prefers familiarity, and it finds it within your habits, thought patterns, beliefs, routines and almost anything else that you do. 

So, leaving these behind is harder than you think, and your brain is going to let you know about it.

While you’re navigating the challenge of becoming the new you, you’re going to have to navigate the challenge and temptation to fall back to familiar ways too.

This is why changing can be so hard, being the old you has never been so attractive, all the while the adaptation of the new you has never been so hard. 

Friends

Your environment plays a huge role in almost everything, especially change, and one of the biggest elements of your environment is the people who you surround yourself with.

So, when your friends hold you back, when your potential surpasses what having them around allows, sacrifices sometimes have to be made.

This can mean leaving them behind, but when your trajectory is in jeopardy at the expense of a friendship, is it really a friendship worth keeping? 

This doesn’t apply to everyone. Most of the time, friendships will slowly fade instead of being a decision that you make to abandon.

Becoming a different person comes with losing some people whom “the old you” was attached to. And when shared habits, interests and beliefs break down, so too does the friendship.

This isn’t an easy process. It can be isolating, lonely, and all without an immediate sign of it being worth the sacrifice.

But you’re not alone, there are more than enough people out there who are not only on the same path as you but are where you’re headed. 

It may be lonely now, but it doesn’t always have to be. Find the others.

Certainty 

Another thing you leave behind when becoming a different person is certainty, comfort, and familiarity.

Whether you were happy with your life and direction or not, it was more than likely predictable, and your brain loves predictability.

Doing what you always did, but also seeing the lives of others around you, made your life's direction almost guaranteed. You could see it everywhere you went.

Going from that to something you’ve never done before, a person you’ve never been before and chasing something of which you have no idea how it’ll go is consciously choosing what the brain hates: uncertainty.

The pain of leaving so much familiarity and predictability is no easy task. You’re relying on faith, belief, determination and discipline to get yourself to where you want to be, all of which are more than likely new to you too. 

Ego 

A decision to become the person you want to be is a decision to be at the very bottom of a ladder. 

It’s being the newcomer, the novice, the apprentice. None of these does a great job of protecting or stroking your ego.

Having an ego isn’t just thinking that you’re the best. Having an ego doesn’t mean you’re cocky, arrogant or overconfident. We all have an ego, having a sense of self is an ego.

And it doesn’t take thinking you’re the best that makes being the worst hurt, it always hurts.

Being a beginner leaves a sense of accomplishment, a sense of skill, and a sense of competency behind. It’s a contract to be terrible, to be hit in the face and reminded of how bad you are over and over each day.

But being temporarily terrible at a life you want is still a better alternative than being competent at a life you don’t.

Potential

Similar to your ego, leaving your “potential” behind can also hurt. 

When you decide to give that thing a go, it no longer becomes “what if” and instead becomes reality.

No more daydreaming, no more picturing yourself as the greatest there ever was.

Only living as being the worst there ever was.

When you commit, you can no longer hide behind a hypothetical, no more excuses, no more what-ifs. Only reality.

This can mean going from an exciting, sexy, attractive dream and heading face-first into an ugly brick wall.

It’s easy to overlook the things you leave behind when you make a decision to change your life. Yes, taking the corresponding actions to what you want and who you want to be is hard. But so is leaving behind parts of yourself and your life that you've become so used to over the years.

What you leave behind should never be overlooked.